SPN 9x7 - Bad Boys
I think this was a really good episode. I’m…sounding unfairly reserved about it because what I’m itching for is some movement on the Zeke front. But this episode was really necessary for what I think and hope is happening with the Ezekiel storyline, which is to simply take an honest look at Dean and why he is who he is and behaves the way he does. Fandom tends to frame Dean’s ~childhood issues as a Universal Misery Chips situation: he put lots of suffering in the bank then, so we ought to let him dole it back out now. And that’s immature and gross and pretty much always ends in outright abuse apologia, definitely. But also? It does a huge disservice to Dean as a character, to ignore how that experience shaped him, in ways that are not necessarily good or bad.
Notice how Dean frames the whole situation. I'll check this when the transcript goes up, but it really sounded like he said “I lost our food money, and I knew YOU’D get hungry.” No, actually, they would BOTH get hungry. But Dean makes it sound like HE would heroically face the music and starve; he turned to a life of crime only because SAM was so needy in the “food” department. This was all a million years ago, Sam is giving no indication of being angry or judgmental about the whole thing, so there’s no need for Dean to be defensive; this line is about Dean trying to convince Sam (and himself) of the story about Dean’s superhuman martyrdom for his helpless little mascot Sammy. The initial situation wasn’t his fault, the fact that he continues to tell the story in the way that bolsters his self-image is, and the fact that his self-image relies on his ability to position himself as the one strong enough to carry the perennial LOAD that is Sam is a petty, ugly part of his character.
I’m not even sure Dean leaving would have been catastrophic for the three of them, in honesty, though of course he was a child and couldn’t possibly have made that call. I can totally see a custody battle over Dean as having been a wake-up call for John, and if it didn’t snap him out of his lifestyle, then the procedure at least would have given Sonny and Dean a chance to get Sam away from him. But…he was a kid, and not one who was particularly keen on risk-taking at the moment. I really applaud how Dean going back wasn’t framed as “love is so powerful and isn’t ~~choosing family~~ the best thing blah blah” - the episode’s very clear that it’s not good that the love people have for their abusers can strip them of their inability to really get how bad things really are. And so I was really bowled over with how that was contextualized with Sam spewing the party line that people seem so desperate to hear from him - Dean, you’re the greatest, you give up everything, blah blah - while we know Dean is actually treating him like shit.
There are aspects to their relationship and history that it makes sense, the characters thinking about them in a highly emotional, dissociated, abstract kind of way. They had a traumatic childhood. But viewers selectively choose to accept them as reliable narrators, and this is a big mistake. And what I think this episode did was to demystify those things and make them a little more concrete, maybe for Dean but certainly for the audience. This episode felt like an early season ghostie-of-the-week, with the gory meat-cleaver murder and the sweet but creepy child and the swinging bare lightbulb and the Ave Maria playing over the death in the bathtub, right up through the heart-to-heart over the roof of the Impala. And it’s not that those things were held up for ridicule, but they are a lot more complicated than the guys or some of the viewers want them to be.
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